Friday, 15 June 2012

Mongolia: Chaucer and Chinggis Khaan

On Saturday 2nd June, I attended
a concert in Gloucester Cathedral to mark the beginning of the Queen’s Diamond
Jubilee celebrations. On Sunday 10th June I enjoyed a concert of
music in Sudbury, Suffolk, performed by children from the town. In between I went
to Mongolia and back.

The drive from Chinggis Khaan airport into
Ulaanbaatar is not encouraging: roads in a dreadful state, traffic
uncontrolled, pollution ditto; on either side gers,
shanties, gas pipes, industrial wasteland and giant advertising hoardings;
people picking their way between puddles and rubbish – a Jake and Dinos Chapman
nightmare landscape writ large. But the city itself, sprawling across a plain surrounded
by mountains, is mercifully different, full of quirks and contrasts.

I’ve never been anywhere quite like
Mongolia. It is a huge country sandwiched between China and Siberia, between the
Gobi Desert and the Steppe, but nearly half its population lives in one place -
Ulaanbaatar, known by everyone there as UB. The Mongolian language,
to my untutored ear, sounds like Mandarin with a Russian inflection, or vice versa. The script is Cyrillic – a
legacy of the Soviet era too complicated to dismantle. And there’s still some
nostalgia for that past. In the State Department Store (the name itself redolent
of Communist control) I search for and find somewhere to get a new battery for
my watch. In a far corner behind a small counter a woman sits mending watches,
and on the wall behind her are large photographs of Soviet women heroes
be-ribboned with as many medals as Borat in his new film, The Dictator. On a plinth outside the Ulaanbaatar Hotel Lenin
himself still stands, larger than life, looking out over the city. Outfacing
him on a giant cinema hoarding is a huge poster - advertising The Dictator. Ivan Illych does not look amused.

Someone else who looks out over the city is
Marco Polo. His
meeting with Kublai Khan is the starting point for Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, Invisible
Cities. This is a book about fantasy
and realism, and about the permeability of perception. It seems to chime eerily
with modern-day UB. Marco Polo himself reflects at one point in the novel,
“Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish
heaps, and the hanging gardens of the Great Khan’s palace. It is our eyelids
that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.’ To
this day, the rubbish heaps and the gardens exist side by side. In the late evening,
someone has dossed down on the steps beneath the statue of Lenin; by the
morning he’s gone, leaving behind his cardboard mattress, the detritus from his
evening meal (cans, and then more cans; a pizza carton from the nearby Grab n’
Go fast food kiosk) and – carefully posed on the top step, as if an offering to
the deity on the plinth – a teddy bear.

Offerings to rather different deities can
be seen in the temples and Datsans (institutes) of the Gandantegchenling
Monastery. Downtown UB this isn’t: the town planners seem to have abandoned
a half-finished attempt to landscape the uphill approach to this imposing
campus from which, beyond the tiled and tilting rooftops of the temples, one
has a plain view of the hills. Campus is the right word for there is a
university here too, the Buddhist University of Mongolia. I learn from a
leaflet that ‘the University combines modern education with traditional
teaching methods. Four year Bachelor’s degree programs are offered and
currently there are two departments. The Department of Internal Sciences which
includes majors in Buddhist Philosophy and Chanting; the Department of Common
Knowledge which includes Tibetan, Sanskrit and English majors as well as a
Traditional Medicine and Astrology major.’

I have to reprove myself for smiling at
this description of common knowledge. Replace Tibetan and Sanskrit with Latin
and Greek; English with, say, Rhetoric; add the elements of Internal Sciences,
Theology and Philosophy, and you have something close to the curriculum of
Cambridge in the 15th century. Even chanting is akin to the medieval
practice of singing the daily offices: in the Vajradhara Temple, a group of
young monks - all teenagers, their scarlet robes only more exotic versions of
student gowns in England – is being taught to chant part of a service. Their
tutor keeps a beady eye on them, but even so one bored monk manages to check
the messages on his mobile phone without being spotted. I remember the words of
the disillusioned monk in the closing lines of Basil Bunting’s 1932 poem, ‘Chomei at
Toyama’:

I do not enjoy
being poor

I’ve a
passionate nature.

My tongue

Clacked a few
prayers.

In six days it is hard to do more than register
as many different images as possible: the DESTROY HAIR AND BEAUTY SALON with,
unusually, its sign in English; the courage and unconcern with which
pedestrians walk out into the surging traffic because if they didn’t no-one
would ever get across the road; the steam engine, still emblazoned with the
head of Stalin, parked beside a main road; the extraordinary new Blue Skies
Building, facing the acres of Parliament Square where children play in pedal
cars in the afternoon sun and students pose for graduation photographs before
the steps of Parliament House.

At the top of these steps sits the largest
statue of all: Chinggis Khaan (do not call him Genghis Khan here), revered not
as the bloodthirsty monster of modern western imagination, and not just as the
man who forged the vast Mongolian Empire but as the leader who established the
Mongolian language, promoted education, cared for his people and insisted on
being buried in an unidentified grave. Perhaps his nearest European equivalent
would have been Charlemagne.

On the grand staircase of the National
Historical Museum there is, in pride of place, the following glowing tribute to
Chinggis Khaan, ‘King of Tartary’:

This noble kyng
was cleped Cambyuskan,

Which in his
tyme was of so greet renoun

That there was nowher
in no regioun

So excellent a
lorde in alle thing,

Hym lakked noght
that longeth to a kyng.

This tribute is Chaucer’s, from The Squire’s Tale.

Adrian Barlow

P.S. I was not on my own in Mongolia. My
thanks to all my fellow education consultants who quickly became my friends; in particular to Tanya, Judith and Laurie - travelling companions with
whom, improbably, I visited Beijing and Moscow airports in the same week.

[Mongolia images: (i) View of the hills beyond the city of Ulaanbaatar (ii) Statue of Lenin in front of Ulaanbaatar Hotel (iii) Statue of Marco Polo facing the Blue Skies Building (2012) (iv) monks at the Gandantegchenling Monastery (v) Parliament Building. Photos by the author .

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk